"In all my years, I've never seen anything quite like this…"

  In the dark void of space, a man, seeming neither young nor old, floated weightlessly, looking towards a bizarre sight.

  It was a moon and star, melded into one stellar object. The star had buried itself deeply into the stone of the enormous moon and now rested inside a molten crater. It gave off the impression of an egg that had cracked open, revealing the glowing yolk within.

  Observing the stellar object, the man, an Immortal, looked deeply concerned.

  It was a beautiful sight, rare beyond imagining, but he couldn't help but notice how deeply and unevenly the star had embedded itself into the moon.

  From what he could see, it appeared the star had slowly melted through the moon, and within just a few millennia, would rupture through to the other side and totally destroy the harmony that had been achieved.

  Even if this phenomenon was useless to him, it was too valuable to ignore.

  This stellar object could prove to be an invaluable place of power to a Cultivator on the appropriate path, and simply leaving it to self-destruct would go against his Immortal convictions.

  'I must stabilize it…'

  Thinking this way, the man gently drifted towards the surface of the moon, traversing a distance of millions of Li at the speed of thought.

  Landing weightlessly onto the stone, the Immortal's body went still as his soul brushed across the breadth of the moon's form, searching for an appropriate place to begin.

  Within moments, he had made his plan and set off towards the side of the moon opposite the star's crater.

  Reaching the ideal position he had calculated, the immortal crouched and placed his hand on the grey stone of the moon.

  It wasn't as easy to manipulate as common stone, but that was to be expected. The laws surrounding such a phenomenal stellar object were bound to be anything but ordinary.

  Once he had a solid grasp of the complexities involved with his chosen material, the Immortal meticulously scribed a series of symbols, forming a bizarre script. First, it was inscribed directly onto the stone, but as he continued, he wrote directly over the air above.

  Slowly, over the course of hours, he wrote out this strange script, floating further from the ground with each minute, until the space around him was filled so thoroughly with inscriptions that there was no more room to work with.

  When he finished, a colossal tower of shimmering inscriptions stood where he began. To this Immortal, it was a 'good enough' piece of work. To a lesser Cultivator, it was an unfathomable monument that would be studied for millennia, the likes of which could lay the groundwork for an immense dynasty.

  Descending to the patch of inscription that rested on the stone below, he placed a hand over it and began filling the inscription with his blood.

  Without the need for an open wound, blood wept from his pores and spilled from the tips of his fingers in thick streams.

  As blood stained the vast inscription, the stone below began to respond to the immense and arcane power above. There was no rumbling or cracking; the stone simply 'grew' upward, filling the empty space between the symbols inscribed on the void above.

  It took mere minutes for the vast array to fill completely with stone. Now, it seemed like the earthen pillar had always been there, as though it were a natural formation.

  The Immortal snapped his fingers and sent a command through his script. Now that its initial function was complete, it moved on to its secondary purpose.

  The script that covered the pillar flowed upwards, collecting at the top of the pillar and billowing out into the void like a weightless fabric.

  In the end, the pillar became a monolithic flag of lunar stone and shimmering inscriptions.

  The Immortal looked it over carefully, making sure there were no flaws to his initial concept. From the minute aspects of how the flagpole had formed, to each symbol he had inscribed, nothing could be overlooked.

  Content with his work, he nodded and gently brushed his fingers across the void. Rippling out from his fingertips, a gaping hole in space spilled a thick air of unease that would cause anyone but him to pale.

  "Let's see… if I want ten thousand of these flags for my formation, I should be able to do a hundred at a time."

  Clapping once, the Immortal called out to the small rift he created. "Come on out, I'll need a few extra hands for this."

  From the expanding rift, malformed bodies limply spilled out, landing awkwardly on the stone below, before rising slowly to their full height.

  These things were grotesque agglomerations of human meat.

  Unsettlingly tall, the puppets stood on bony, stilt-like legs, their top-heavy bodies wrapped in mummified skin and dehydrated flesh that was covered in scabrous, ulcerated growths that had fossilized into unseemly lumps millennia ago.

  Each of the puppets sported many heads, near skeletonized things draped in fraying skin, set deeply into their bulbous torsos and shifting in their sockets like maggots in an old corpse.

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  After a hundred of the puppets emerged from the rift, it slid shut, and within seconds, it was as if it had never been there.

  The puppets autonomously stood and spread out, away from one another, according to some ancient orders. Before they moved far, the Immortal shut his eyes, and all the puppets froze in place.

  The man spread his soul out, and into each of the puppets, controlling them as directly as his own body.

  Adjusting to controlling a hundred bodies at once was trivial; in an instant, each of the hundred puppets shot across the surface of the moon, taking their individual positions in a grand and complex pattern.

  Simultaneously, each puppet began its inscription work, just as the Immortal's main body had, and within a few dozen hours, another hundred flags stood on the surface of the moon.

  'Good, this will work.' In a manner only an Immortal could tolerate, he began his work in earnest, sitting perfectly still while coordinating a hundred bodies, proceeding with the same construction time after time after time.

  The work continued for many months, until ten thousand flags stood across the surface of the moon, arranged in a grand formation.

  The instant the work was complete, the Immortal severed his connection to the puppets, leaving them to shamble aimlessly across the surface of the moon.

  'Now then…' The Immortal's body flickered, vanishing from his position on the far end of the moon and reappearing over the crater that held the star. 'I'll need an anchor…'

  Sifting through innumerable years of memories, he contemplated the myriad divine treasures and artefacts he had obtained, hoping to find something ideal for the situation.

  Reaching out to the void, the Immortal grasped the empty space and pulled an enormous gong out of an invisible gap in space. 'Simple, durable enough, and I'm certain not to miss it.'

  Inscribing numerous simple instructions across the surface of the gong, he spilled blood over the gong.

  It flowed slowly at first, coating the surface and seeping into the inscriptions, but rapidly accelerated as strands of blood flowed off the gong and coalesced into animated serpents that shot outwards towards the surface of the moon, around the myriad flags of the Immortal's formation.

  His serene expression was unmoved even as trillions of litres of blood gushed forth from his hands, flowing out into the void. Were another Immortal present, even one older and more powerful, they would surely be baffled by the unending deluge of blood.

  After a moment's hesitation, the immortal cast the gong away, allowing it to fall towards the star, now converted to the role of an anchor.

  Easily outracing the anchor, he centered himself on the opposite end of the moon, in the very center of his formation.

  The dozens of blood serpents that linked the ten thousand flags to the anchor appeared on the horizon, now shooting towards the Immortal at a speed that far outraced any mortal thing.

  As the serpents reached him, they penetrated into his body without any resistance.

  Run through by dozens of his own serpents, the Immortal had the appearance of some restrained beast, held squarely in place by his own bizarre chains.

  The bodies of the blood serpents were indescribably long and trailed across the surface of the entire moon, leading all the way to the crater where that star had buried itself.

  In an instant, the serpents turned rigid and tense. The Immortal sensed the anchor reach the surface of the star. It was finally time to complete his work.

  The moment the anchor reached the star, it adhered itself strongly, denying the amorphous nature of solar fire and forming a connection from which the star itself could be maneuvered.

  The Immortal, now with a direct connection to the anchor through his formation, began to strain, drawing the trillions of litres of blood back into his body through the serpents, slowly reducing them through reabsorption.

  In this way, the anchor, and the star along with it would be lifted from the molten crater and could be placed in a more stable equilibrium within the moon. “Even if the end result is useless to me, it was worthwhile to brush up on my skills.”

  Content with his work, he stood perfectly still, reabsorbing his blood serpents, litre by litre, hour by hour, day by day, month by month.

  It was inevitable for progress to be slow. Moving a star was no simple feat. However, when the first year passed with little progress, he couldn't help but feel confused. 'Surely this can't be right… The tension I feel through the serpents is… excessive, the weight of the star alone shouldn't feel like this.'

  For months, he scoured the surface of the star with his soul, hoping to discover why his progress had slowed to a crawl. Eventually, his reabsorption entirely stopped, and the star had begun to distend strangely into an oval, one end pulled up and out by his anchor.

  'Should I release it? I need to act slowly…' As he thought to himself, his soul finally noticed something strange. It wasn’t on the surface of the star, but beneath it, buried beneath the surface of the moon, directly between the star and the immortal was a disk. Deliberately crafted with delicate inscriptions on its surface.

  It was completely inert, or so it seemed. No Spiritual Energy, Blood Essence, or any force of the Dao could be detected from it. Even so, the immortal immediately realized it was an anchor of its own, and one far beyond even his abilities at that.

  For the first time since seeing this strange stellar object, his expression changed. 'I'm pulling against… this thing!? With all my strength!?'

  Plain and simple, the Immortal had accidentally created the most obscene slingshot in the myriad worlds. And it was pulled taut, aimed directly towards himself.

  'I need to lower the anchor and settle the star back into position!'

  The moment he thought of how to free himself from his predicament, as if by some karmic misfortune, the gong he had forged into an anchor, a tool he intended only to last until the end of his work, broke. It tore apart from the immense pressure that had been pulling on it for well over a year.

  In the following instant, the Immortal lacked the time to form full thoughts and acted purely on instinct.

  Escape? Impossible, he was still anchored to his formation by the blood serpents. It would take time to undo.

  Instantly, the star shot back into position with an excess of force, shattering the anchor that predated the Immortal's arrival, without even slowing down.

  Defense? Also impossible. He considered himself strong, but defending against a star in motion? Solar fire was no laughing matter.

  The stone beneath the Immortal's feet crumbled, and light shone through the split ground to present him with his failure.

  'I'll die…! But I'll come back, the formation I put on my soul will save my memories from the cycle of reincarnation, it will work! I know it!' During the instant of his last thoughts, his immortal body had already been obliterated by a deluge of solar flame.

  Unlike his body, the blast of the rupturing star hadn't destroyed his soul, but had broken it apart. Within the next few hours, the charred remains of that soul drifted apart, breaking down into smaller and smaller fragments that would never be whole again.

  The larger fragments, however degraded they were, drifted about together in the aftermath and naturally seeped into the background of the universe, drifting towards reincarnation.

  He was right. The formation on his soul would save his memories from reincarnation. But it wouldn't save his own self from being burnt away in solar fire.